AGEIA is launching its PhysX card into the present with a PCI-Express incarnation. Will this be enough to drive up its popularity? Plus, nVIDIA was caught with its pants down, cheating on Havok.
AGEIA has announced that a PCI-Express version of its niche PhysX physics accelerator card will soon be available.
Apparently the bandwidth offered by the 32-bit PCI interface is sufficient for incoming and outgoing physics data, so this newer form is said to be no faster.
Merely an interface change, this is most likely a move to increase the popularity surrounding the fairly exotic physics processor. With few new PCs actually being equipped with many, if any, PCI slots, this stands to make sense.
No mention was made of whether these will be available as individual add-in cards, with the press release stating "PCI-Express cards will be available integrated into new gaming PCs in time for Christmas [from] leading OEM system manufacturers."
However, I don't believe this is enough to pick up steam and sell sufficiently more. Just as I've previously mentioned regarding an AI processor, the need for a dedicated physics processor is equally dubious.
With multi-cored CPUs coming into general use and game developers reportedly saying that any more than two cores is too many, the question of why one would need such a processor lingers.
Did you hear that? It was the sound of familiarity wooshing by.
Interestingly, nVIDIA's hands were caught vigorously fondling around in AGEIA's PhysX pants recently at Digital Life 2006 in New York. Whether this was a PCI or PCI-Express card remains unknown.
Perhaps nVIDIA's implementation of Havok's physics just isn't ready for prime time.
Does this mean nVIDIA will skip to third base and slap an AGEIA processor in all of its high-end graphics cards? Unlikely, but not impossible.
Whether AGEIA can successfully push a dedicated physics card to the point of common use remains to be seen.
A larger line-up of supported and available mainstream games certainly wouldn't go astray.